CT Biz Blogs

On Friday, I mentioned that I’d found a new Connecticut small business blog (started in November, 2005), Hadley Spagna Photography.

I ended by saying that there were a few things that bugged me. This was a bit harsh; I didn’t mean to say I thought she was doing anything wrong, just that I believe there are some things she needs to think about doing better.

 One thing I noticed is that her main web site is in Flash. I don’t like a lot of Flash on web sites for several reasons, but the main one is: lack of opportunity to optimize your site for search engines.  Maybe this will change one day, but right now, search engine crawlers (spiders and ‘bots who go looking for text) can’t read what’s in Flash.

 That’s because a web page that has Flash is actually just a “wrapper,” a shell with a link to the Flash file itself, which is a special, proprietary Macromedia Shockwave Flash file. If your browser has the Flash plug-in, it can play the Flash file, but web crawlers can’t parse the text in a Flash file the way they do with regular web pages. Well, Google claims to be able to, to a limited extent. But for most search engines, the text in Hadley’s web site doesn’t exist. Yes, there are some keywords in the title of the page on her web site (up at the top), but basically, that’s it for keywords on her web site.

On the other hand, people can’t copy images, if they’re in Flash. This is a valid concern for photographers.

 My recommendation to people who want Flash, is to only have it in selected sections, such as the photo gallery.  There are non-Flash ways to get fancy effects, such as sliding text.

Here’s an article with more techy detail on Flash and its SEO limitations.

Of course, having a blog helps a lot with that search engine optimization (SEO) bit. One way to maximize your “findability” is to really work the blog, even more so when you have a web site that can’t help you much with SEO.

So for Hadley’s blog, I’d recommend something other than Blogger. Blogger is fine for experimenting, but to really get the most out of your blog, hosting your own is best, or using a blogging tool that has more features than Blogger, such as Wordpress.com or Typepad.

 One essential thing to implement in a more full-featured blog application is the use of categories or tags.  I’ll write more on what those are at a later date, but the important thing to know is that categories and/or tags will help readers by organizing the posts in a more contextual way, and will help bloggers by giving them more keywords which are repeated on each post (namely, the category titles).

If you want to use Blogger, there are some Blogger hacks to add categories. I haven’t tried them out myself, yet.  They’re not easy to implement for novices, though. You have to tweak the template a bit.

So, once again, blogging comes to the rescue!  Got a less than optimum web site? No problem! You just have to work that extra bit harder to maximize the search engine “juice” you can get from having a blog.